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City of Stuart Mayor Eula Clarke is the focus of a City Commission meeting at City Hall on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2017, for her use of the term "pig" in front of a Stuart police officer at a local grocery store in January.(Photo: XAVIER MASCAREÑAS/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)Buy Photo

STUART — When City Commissioner Eula Clarke uttered the word "pig" in front of a police officer last month, it not only ignited an uproar throughout the city, but also exposed a rift between its black community and the other four commissioners, who all are white.

Clarke has apologized to the officer, to the police union and to the community as a whole. She resigned from her post as mayor, though she remains a commissioner. She was first elected in 2010.

Yet all that has failed to mend the wounds. The past week has peeled back the veneer, exposing the racial tension between two sides.

The anger evident at a special City Commission meeting on Wednesday, however, largely came from those who live, work, go to church and visit friends in East Stuart, the city's historically and predominantly black area. They support Clarke, who is Jamaican. While commissioners are elected at-large to represent the entire city, it's Clarke, residents say, who is visible in the community.

Racial tensions were anything but subtle at the Wednesday meeting. Take, for example, when Clarke's supporters accused the four white commissioners of making no effort to understand black culture. Pig's feet, more than one speaker said, is associated with Southern Caribbean cooking.

Pig's feet, they said, could have been what she was talking about in the grocery store.

"Mrs. Clarke only made a comment about something that is from our culture. When you go into an African-American neighborhood and you go into their grocery store, they are going to have the pig's feet," Althea Wiley, a Port St. Lucie resident who attends Mount Calvary Baptist Church in East Stuart, said in an interview Friday. "You take one comment and you crucify her for that?"

One commissioner pushed back.

"This is America. This isn't Jamaica," Commissioner Jeffrey Krauskopf said in an interview. Turning the tables, he said there should be cultural sensitivity to the derogatory nature of the word "pig" toward police.

On Wednesday night, Clarke supporters drowned out speakers who wanted Clarke's resignation from the commission and for her to face an investigation by hooting and vigorously clapping to overpower those who spoke against Clarke.

Several speakers stepped to the podium only to charge the white commissioners with also making racially insensitive comments themselves, though none offered specifics.

Mary Hutchinson, a former Stuart City Commissioner and mayor, said Wednesday she was "scared" to speak at the meeting because she saw how Clarke supporters treated Clarke's critics.

Hutchinson, one of only a handful of people who spoke on Wednesday against Clarke, addressed part of her comments to Clarke directly.

"Our police officers are some of the nicest, kindest people," Hutchinson said. "You reinforce the negative attitudes that they face each day. Each day you remain in office, you divide our city even more."

Clarke, 59, has admitted that on Jan. 11, she walked into Taylor's Grocery, 610 S.E. 10th St. in East Stuart, saw Officer Ed Fitzgerald — in uniform and on duty — and said, "I didn't know we were serving pig tonight."

Fitzgerald, who is white, has patrolled the neighborhood for more than a year, focusing on embedding himself in the East Stuart community to gain its trust as a way to curb violence after an increase in shootings there in 2014 and 2015, City Manager Paul Nicoletti said. Fitzgerald still is assigned to East Stuart, Nicoletti said.

After 2½ hours of public comment Wednesday night, the four white commissioners voted to open an investigation into Clarke's remark and into whether she has made offensive comments to other city staff members.

Undeniably, Clarke has done a lot for East Stuart, Commissioner Kelli Glass Leighton said, ceding that point to Clarke's supporters.

But "just because someone has done a lot for the community doesn't mean their actions or the words they say won't face scrutiny or repercussions," Glass Leighton said.

As for a rift between the four white commissioners and the East Stuart community?

It's more of a difference of opinion between Clarke's supporters and her critics, Glass Leighton said.

For his part, Krauskopf in an interview rejected claims that he and other commissioners are uninvolved in East Stuart.

It would have been accurate, Krauskopf said, if Clarke's supporters had said, "We see Eula (Clarke) and we identify with her more than we identify with you.